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Tuesday, 27 June 2017

Seymour Hersh on the war in Syria

The
Fog of War

Seymour
Hersh and the Question as to What Really Happened in Khan Sheikhoun.

March
1968: Vietnamese civilians allegedly murdered by US troops in My Lai

Quelle:
Getty Images

Reporter
Seymour Hersh was just 32 years old when he became a legend. In late
1969, he revealed that U.S. soldiers had massacred over 100 civilians
-- including women, children and old men -- in the small village of
My Lai in South Vietnam.

Several informants had long tried
unsuccessfully to find a journalist to report on the slaughter, which
had actually taken place in early 1968 in an area known within U.S.
Army as "Pinkville." After Hersh published his first
article on My Lai, he spoke with one of the participants, who
expressed surprise that the media had kept quiet for so long.
“Pinkville has been a word among GIs for a year… I’ll never
cease to be amazed that it hasn’t been written about before.” It
was a crucial lesson for Hersh. Enormous scandals, he learned, can be
common knowledge within an institution like the U.S. Army and still
the general public knows nothing of it. And sometimes, journalists
hear about these stories but fail to follow up. Indeed, it became an
insight that became a leitmotif of Hersh’s career: Write stories
that others don't want to write, read or believe. To this day, most
of Hersh’s work focuses on overreach and abuse by the U.S.
government in its deployment of the nation's powerful intelligence
agencies and military -- and how that power is often used to cover up
scandals.

The
risk of such scandals is always heightened in times of war. Such as
Iraq. The U.S. invaded the country in 2003 on the search for chemical
weapons that, as Washington had previously insisted to the
international community, were sure to be found.

As
they had in Vietnam, U.S. troops committed war crimes in Iraq as
well. In Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad, they
systematically tortured and abused inmates in addition to humiliating
them by photographing them naked and bound.

Hersh
was the first journalist to report on the Abu Ghraib scandal as well.
The U.S. government had tried to keep the scandal under wraps,
seeking to prevent documents, photos and other evidence from reaching
the public. But sources provided the material to Hersh, knowingly
breaking U.S. law to do so.

Now
80 years old, Seymour Hersh has proved to be an almost obsessive
reporter during his career, willing to go to great lengths to
overcome obstacles. And he has seldom demonstrated a willingness to
compromise -- a characteristic that hasn't always made him friends at
the publications for which he has worked, including theNew
Yorker and
the New
York Times.
He has pushed more than one editor to their limits. His reporting on
U.S. President Barack Obama was just as critical as it was on Nixon,
the Bushes or Clinton. In an article two years ago, he wrote that
some within the Obama administration knew that Osama bin Laden was
living under the protection of Pakistani intelligence in Abbottabad
long before the raid to kill him was ultimately launchd.

The
story led to a falling out between Hersh and the editor-in-chief of
the New
Yorker and
it was ultimately published in the renowned London
Review of Books.
In another story for the same publication, he quoted from a secret
Congressional report, which claimed that the CIA, during the Obama
administration, had developed a "Rat Line" to smuggle
weapons from Libya to Syria in order to support militias fighting
against the regime of Bashar Assad. The fake companies established as
part of the Rat Line, Hersh wrote, were later thought to have been
used by the Turkish secret service to arm Islamist militias inside of
Syria.

As
has been the case so often in his professional life, Hersh was
harshly criticized for his most recent stories about Syria, about
Obama, and about bin Laden. Many say he goes too far and relies too
heavily on anonymous sources. Crucially, though, no source who is
actively working for a government can reveal classified information
“on the record” without incurring considerable personal risk.
That holds true in Germany as well.

As
has always been his practice, Hersh has told Welt
am Sonntag the
identities of all the sources he quotes anonymously in his story
about Trump's retaliatory strike against Syria. The paper was thus
able to speak independently to the central source in the U.S.

Hersh
had also offered the article to the London Review of Books. The
editors accepted it, paid for it, and prepared a fact checked article
for publication, but decided against doing so, as they told Hersh,
because of concerns that the magazine would vulnerable to criticism
for seeming to take the view of the Syrian and Russian governments
when it came to the April 4th bombing in Khan Sheikhoun. Hersh
had met a few times with Stefan Aust when he was editor of Der
Spiegel and followed his career. According to Hersh, he knew Aust to
be someone who was unafraid of the consequences of publishing stories
that, when verified and checked, he knew to be true. It was a natural
move to send the story, as edited, to him.

It
was a situation that Seymour Hersh had experienced before. At the
very beginning of his career, no publication wanted to print his My
Lai story either.

What
exactly happened in western Syria on April 4, 2017, when Khan
Sheikhoun was bombed, is still not entirely clear. The events
continue to be obscured by the thick fog of war.

A
Russian-Syrian-Iranian alliance is fighting against militia groups,
both jihadist and otherwise, in the Idlib region. All parties to the
war have one thing in common: They reject democracy and view
journalists as enemies, making it extremely difficult to report
freely from this battlefield.

As
such it is quite surprising that, just hours after the attack on Khan
Sheikhoun, politicians and the majority of media outlets had
established such a clear picture of what had happened: that Assad's
troops had attacked the town with the dreaded poison gas sarin. But
the town is under the control of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a
militia affiliated with al-Qaida. It is impossible to know precisely
how freely people can move about -- including doctors and members of
Syrian relief organizations -- in this region and how openly they can
report on the war.

Even
in the very first interviews that were said to have come directly
from Khan Skeikhoun, all of those interviewed agreed that sarin had
been used. One doctor in town, who was quoted frequently throughout
the day, took the time to film extensive video footage, conduct Skype
interviews and, shortly after the attack, tweet: “OUR HOSPITAL
GETTING FULL FROM THE SARIN ATTACK TODAY. ANYONE THAT WANTS EVIDENCE,
I WILL VIDEO CALL YOU.”

It
is in fact quite difficult to ascertain at first glance whether
sarin, another toxic gas or a chemical agent was used. The first
reporter from a Western newspaper to reach the town worked for the
British Guardian.
His article included several quotes from people who claimed to be
eyewitnesses: "We could smell it from 500 meters away," one
said, referring to the gas. Yet sarin is odorless.

To
clear up the contradictions and questions, an independent
investigation on site is needed. Were that to happen, it would be
quite possible to determine if sarin was used, but such a process
takes time in an active war zone like Idlib. Yet on April 6, when the
American military launched cruise missiles at the Syrian airport, the
process of initiating an independent investigation hadn't even been
started.

By
bombing the Syrian airport, Trump set the tone for how the attack on
Khan Sheikhoun would ultimately be interpreted and America's Western
allies quickly concurred with the president's viewpoint. France
published a classified intelligence report that claimed there were no
doubts that Assad's military had deployed sarin. Two hours earlier,
then-French President François Hollande had already committed to
this position. He and German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued a joint
statement about “the massacre with chemical weapons” following
the American retaliatory strikes. "President Assad bears sole
responsibility for this development," the statement read. "His
repeated use of chemical weapons ... demanded sanctions." Their
position was clear.

Ultimately,
though, it is up to a United Nations commission to decide whether an
attack in Syria should be considered a war crime. The commission was
formed in 2011 to investigate the war in Syria. The statement it
issued after the April 4 attack was carefully worded, and the
commission has been silent since.

Members
of the Geneva-based Independent International Commission of Inquiry
on the Syrian Arab Republic are also aware of the complexities of the
situation in the war zone. Analyzing, comparing, verifying and
rebutting statements, data and reports takes time.

It
was a different organization, though, that pushed to the forefront to
provide the quick answers everyone was asking for: the Organization
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), an intergovernmental
organization financed by the signatories to the Chemical Weapons
Convention that works together with the United Nations. The
organization has become more careful since Syrian rebels took an OPCW
team hostage in 2014 and after the April attack, an OPCW team
traveled not to the location of the presumed gas attack, but to the
neighboring country of Turkey. Team members were able to observe the
autopsies of three alleged victims of the poison gas attack. An NGO
had delivered the bodies to the hospitals, though OPCW will not
publicly comment on the identity of the NGO. Samples from the bodies
were provided to two separate laboratories, which independently
confirmed indications of sarin or sarin-like substances.

In
criminal proceedings, though, which are similar to the process
followed by the UN in determining a war crime, it is a fundamental
principle that all evidence be under the control of investigators at
all times. That didn't happen in this case. Indeed, the UN Syria
commission doesn't intend to report its version of events to the
General Assembly until September, after it investigates all sources,
particularly those on site in Khan Sheikhoun. Fighting through the
fog of war to discover the truth takes time.

But
on April 4, when the U.S. president awoke and saw photos of dead
babies and decided to respond immediately, the final results of a
thorough investigation were as far away as peace in Syria.

Asked,
if government lies still make him as angry as in his first days of
his career, Hersh replied: „It is more than being upset about lying
– it’s about the reluctance of us in the press to hold the men
and women who run the world's governments to the highest possible
standards. We have a President in America today who lies repeatedly
about the most meaningless of information, but he must learn that he
cannot lie about the intelligence relied upon before authorizing an
act of war.

There are those in the Trump administration that
understand this, which is why I learned the information I did. If
this story creates even a few moments of regret in the white house it
will have served a very high purpose.“